The present invention relates generally to a client-server technology and more particularly to a client-server system with the application delivered to the client being automatically modified based on the resources available.
A server computer may deliver applications to many different types of clients through many different types of media. For example, the server can be delivering a page to a printer through a cable, a note to a pager through radio waves, an audio message to a cellular phone through microwave, a web page to an Internet enabled computer or a palmtop through infrared radiation, a movie to a television through optical fibers, or an on-off command to the switch of a microwave oven or the central air-conditioning system of a house through twisted pairs.
Each of these clients or appliances have different capabilities. Some of them can have relatively powerful microprocessors and memory capacity, such as a palmtop. Others can be ultra-thin clients with minimal computation and memory power, such as a television. The delivery media can be very different. For example, some have large bandwidth, such as optical fibers; but others have low bandwidth, such as twisted pairs. Also, the applications can be quite diverse. For example, a movie requires large bandwidth, low latency, and is quite tolerant to error rates; but an on-off command to a switch has to be absolutely accurate, though the bandwidth requirement is low.
There is typically a specific approach to deliver each type of application through a specific medium to a specific client. For example, if you want to print a page, you will activate a specific printer driver to print that page; and if you want to send a web-page to your Internet enabled computer, your web-page is compressed by a certain pre-determined ratio and is transmitted following a specific network protocol. Different software programs are called by the server to accomplish such diverse tasks.
Whether an Internet enabled computer or a television requests for an interactive application, which is an application that you can interact with, such as a web-page, the server typically follows the same preset network protocol to deliver the interactive application. In other words, if, for example, the transmission medium is changed after the protocol is preset, the server does not have the intelligence to modify the protocol dynamically in view of the change. There is no intelligent adaptability on the part of the server. The server would not know or would not care that a user is sitting one foot away from the web-page on the Internet enabled computer, or is sitting six feet away from the web-page on the television.
Not only does the server lack adaptability, the server would not be able to respond to certain requests from certain clients. For example, the application is a push application, which is an application determined by a user based on her profile, such as quoting the stock price of XEROX at 1 PM everyday. A server would not be able to respond automatically to both a pager requesting for a stock quote, and a standard telephone requesting for a weather report. The way it is typically done nowadays is to have a separate server dedicated to handle each of these tasks.
It should be apparent from the foregoing that there is still a need for an apparatus and method to automatically handle such diverse applications, client capabilities and transmission media, such that different applications can be automatically modified based on the resources available from the transmission media and the clients.